Monthly Archives: December 2013

Allama Iqbal’s letter to Mr. Jinnah

Posted on by
Reply

 

An important letter by Allama Iqbal to Mr. Jinnah

Confidential,
28th May, 1937
My dear Mr. Jinnah,

Thank you so much for your letter which reached me in due course. I am glad to hear that you will bear in mind what I wrote to you about the changes in the constitution and programme of the League. I have no doubt that you fully realise the gravity of the situation as far as Muslim India is concerned. The League will have to finally decide whether it will remain a body representing the upper classes of Indian Muslims or Muslim masses who have so far with good reason, taken no interest in it. Personally I believe that a political organisation which gives no promise of improving the lot of the average Muslim can not attract our masses.
Under the new constitution the higher posts go to the sons of upper classes; the smaller ones go to the friends or relatives of the ministers. In other matters too our political institution have never thought of improving the lot of Muslims generally. The problem of bread is becoming more and more acute. The Muslim has begun to feel that he has been going down and down during the last 200 years. Ordinarily he believes that his poverty is due to Hindu money-lending or capitalism. The perception that it is equally due to foreign rule has not yet fully come to him. But it is bound to come. The atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal is not likely to receive much response from the Muslims. The question therefore is: how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League’s activity to solve this question. If the League can give no such promises I am sure that Muslim masses will remain indifferent to it as before. Happily there is a solution in the enforcement of the Law of Islam and its further development in the light of modern ideas. After a long and careful study of Islamic Law I have come to the conclusion that if this system of Law is properly understood and applied, at last the right to subsistence is secured to everybody. But the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam is impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states. This has been my honest conviction for many years and I still believe this to be the only way to solve the problem of bread for Muslims as well as to secure a peaceful India. If such a thing is impossible in India the only other alternative is a civil war which as a matter of fact has been going on for some time in the shape of Hindu-Muslim riots. I fear that in certain parts of the country, e.g. N.-W. India, Palestine may be repeated. Also the insertion of Jawaharlal’s socialism into the body politic of Hinduism is likely to cause much bloodshed among the Hindus themselves. The issue between social democracy and Brahmanism is not dissimilar to the one between Brahmanism and Buddhism. Whether the fate of socialism will be the same as the fate of Buddhism in India I cannot say. But it is clear to my mind that if Hinduism accepts social demopracy it must necessarily cease to be Hindaism. For Islam the acpeptance of social democracy in some suitable form and consistent with the legal principles of Islam is not a revolution but a return to the original purity of Islam. The modern problems therefore are more easy to solve for the Muslims than for the Hindus. But as I have said above in order to make it possible for Muslim India to solve the problems it is necessary to redistribute the country and to provide one or more Muslim states with absolute majorities. Don’t you think that the Lime for such a demand has already arrived? Perhaps this is the best reply you can give to the atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyhow I have given you my own thoughts in the hope that you will give them serious consideration either in your address or in the discussions of the coming session of the League. Muslim India hopes that at this serious juncture your genius will discover some way out of our present difficulties.

Yours sincerely,
(Sd.) Muhammad Iqbal

P.S. On the subject-matter of the letter I intended to Write to you a long and open letter in the press. But on further consideration I felt that the present moment was not suitable for such step.

Private and Confidential,
June 21st, 1937

Shared by Noor Salik

Darwin Awards of 2013

Posted on by
Reply

( A time for little humor. Enjoy it. No comments on this post please)

Yes, it’s that magical time of year again when the Darwin Awards are bestowed, honoring the least evolved among us.

Here Is The Glorious Winner:
1. When his .38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked.
And Now, The Honorable Mentions:
2. The chef at a hotel in Switzerland lost a finger in a meat cutting machine and after a little shopping around, submitted a claim to his insurance company. The company expecting negligence sent out one of its men to have a look for himself. He tried the machine and he also lost a finger. The chef’s claim was approved.
3. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.
4. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.
5. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.
6.. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15. [If someone points a gun at you and gives you money, is a crime committed?]
Posted By F. Sheikh

Below the Surface: How Our Unconscious Rules Our Lives

Posted on by
Reply

An article from Scientific American

Note: To read the full article, please click the hyper-link!!

Below the Surface: How Our Unconscious Rules Our Lives

Driving home after a visit with a relative, you suddenly realize you have no specific memory of how you got there. Well, you’ve taken that trip so many times, you tell yourself, that you could just about do in your sleep. Tying a shoe later, you reflect again on how often you accomplish things while your conscious mind is barely paying attention. Of course, you’re not wrong. We all have those moments.

At around three pounds, the gelatinlike tissue in your skull accounts for only a couple of percent of your total body mass, but it consumes a lot of energy—some 20 percent of the calories you eat every day. Conscious thought is “expensive” in energy terms. Is it any wonder the brain tends to shift its more costly processing tasks toward becoming more automated, “cheaper” routines?

That thought struck me during one of our weekly editorial meetings some months ago while we were discussing story ideas. How much of our lives is actually decided for us by our brain without our active awareness, I wondered? Naturally, when I asked that question out loud, longtime Scientific American senior editor Gary Stix was only too happy to explore the answer. The outcome is the cover story by Yale University psychologist John A. Bargh, “How Unconscious Thought and Perception Affect Our Every Waking Moment.”

Bargh explains how decision making about such tasks as voting, making purchases or even planning vacations often occurs without our giving things much conscious thought. In matters small and large, we routinely arrive at automatic judgments, our behaviors shaped by embedded attitudes. Put another way, awareness about our relative lack of awareness gives us a new appreciation for how profoundly our unconscious mind steers our lives.

 

 

 

 

Should Polygmay be allowed in USA ?

Posted on by
Reply

In a recent court ruling in Utah, a Federal judge ruled that the ban on marriage co-habitation is un-constitutional. The plaintiff in this case was a Mormon and asked the court to rule the ban on co-habitation un-constitutional because the existing law uses the language of co-habitation and not polygamy, but the law was applied to polygamy also. The Judge ruled that marriage license, for legal purposes, can be with only one wife but others can be only co-habitants. Following are some thoughts by experts in NYT. Dr, Aziz Amin gave a wonderful talk on this subject at Thinkers Forum some time ago.  Although it has religious dimension also, but If you like to comment, please comment only from social and legal point of view and not religious aspect. Thanks. ( F. Sheikh)   

Legally, No Different From Same-Sex Unions

Ron Den Otter

Ron Den Otter is an associate professor of political science at Cal Poly San Luis Opisbo.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Americans are becoming more accustomed to the idea that it may not be wrong for people to have unconventional intimate relationships, provided that all of those involved are consenting adults. Television programs, like HBO’s “Big Love,” TLC’s “Sister Wives” and the National Geographic Channel’s “Polygamy USA” have illuminated the unique challenges of multipartner relationships. The more charitable media portrayal of polygamy, coupled with the debate over same-sex marriage, has encouraged a few academics to think more deeply about the meaning of marriage in a morally pluralistic society like our own. Limiting the size of a marriage may soon be seen as no more justified (or constitutional) than restricting marriage to same-race or opposite-sex couples.

Enough With the Scare Tactics

John Corvino

John Corvino, chairman of the philosophy department at Wayne State University, is the author of “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?”

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:30 PM

 

Conservative fearmongers have long warned that same-sex marriage will send the nation down a slippery slope to polygamy, and they’re pointing to the recent Utah decision as evidence. The marriage-equality movement does indeed have a connection with recent challenges to polygamy bans — just not the connection that fearmongers contend.

 

 

There are two versions of the slippery-slope argument from gay marriage to polygamy, and as I’ve argued at length elsewhere, they’re both bad. One version claims that because procreation requires one man and one woman, that’s the only logical arrangement for marriage, and once you reject that standard, anything goes. But whatever its merits as an argument against same-sex marriage, the physical complementarity of the sexes makes a terrible argument against polygamy: Human biology makes it quite possible — which is not to say desirable — for a man to impregnate multiple women or for a woman to bear the children of multiple men.

We Are a Nation of Boundary Breakers

Melynda Price

Melynda Price is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law and blogs at Thoughts of an Ivory Tower Interloper.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

We tend to forget this nation began with the pushing, then breaking, of boundaries. We have moved in slow, plodding steps from a nation that practiced widespread exclusion to a more expansive democracy. It may be hard for some to swallow polygamy as a democratic practice, but perhaps it is.

Polygamy Is Bad for Women

Shoshana Grossbard

Shoshana Grossbard is a professor of economics emerita at San Diego State University and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Zaragoza. In 2010, she testified as an expert witness at a constitutional reference case in British Columbia aimed at determining the validity of Canada’s polygamy law.

UPDATED DECEMBER 17, 2013, 6:39 PM

According to Pierre Trudeau, late prime minister of Canada, “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” In that spirit Adam Winkler favors lifting the ban on plural marriage.

I used to agree with him, but now I think differently. Under polygyny, markets for wives are sellers’ markets, where men can participate multiple times but women can only do so once at a time. Assuming a free market, women will pick their marriage partners and capture the entire value added of marriage.

A Step in the Wrong Direction

W. Bradford Wilcox

W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, is the author of “Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives.” He is onTwitter.

DECEMBER 17, 2013

 

In their embrace of a laissez faire approach to family life, some liberals andlibertarians seem blind to a basic truth: namely, the success of liberalism depends in part on thriving two-parent families. Not so for William Galston, who recognized in his book “Liberal Purposes” that American liberalism depends upon virtues most likely to be cultivated in a particular family type. He wrote: “From the standpoint of economic well-being and sound psychological development, the evidence indicates that the intact, two-parent family is generally preferable to the available alternatives.”

Understanding Who ‘They’ Are

Ralph Richard Banks

Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds professor of law at Stanford Law School, is the author of “Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.”

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Will the advent of same-sex marriage portend the demise of laws that prohibit polygamous marriage? Maybe. The legal arguments for the continued prohibition of polygamous marriage are not nearly as weighty as commonly thought. Rather, what undergirds the continued rejection of polygamy are social understandings that inform moral and legal reasoning about marriage laws.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/12/17/should-plural-marriage-be-legal/understanding-those-who-practice-polygamy